The Global Translator Plugin Effect

I have this little idea before that for me to attract more search engine traffic, I should start translating my blog to other languages. Like creating a sub-domain such as cn.macuha.com for Chinese version of this blog, using the Google Translate tool manually to translate my posts.

What I’m thinking is it doesn’t matter if the translation is poor or sometimes incomprehensible, as long as the Google ads are present. The post will be a poor translation of my post (Google Translate is far from perfect) making the Google ads standout because they are the one written properly in Chinese, therefore attracting more clicks. This seems a good idea, but it’s something that did not push through before because of procrastination. 🙁 And I’m a little bit lazy doing the manual translation of each post to other languages.

Last November 6, I installed the Global Translator plugin on this blog. It’s a plugin that does exactly what I wanted to do automatically. Except that the translation will not be on a sub-domain, but rather on a sub-directory.

The pages are not translated instantly. The translation takes time because the plugin cannot connect every minute to the translation engine. My settings on this blog only translate a page every 10 minutes. And with 600+ posts on this blog to be translated to 34 languages, that really needs a lot of time.

Before I installed this plugin, I only have 1200 pages indexed on Google. After a month, there are already 4550 pages indexed on Google. The logs shows that it has already 4491 successfully translated pages using 64.5 MB of my disk resources. I’m expecting at least 20,000 translated pages after 5 months.

Now, did it increase my blog traffic? Yes. Based on my statistics, this page alone gave me an additional 600 visitors for the last 30 days. Other pages are giving 1 to 2 additional visitors per day, mostly coming from long tail searches. Obviously, the more pages indexed in Google, the higher the possibility that it will show-up on the search results. Now I’m getting additional visitors from Netherlands, China, Japan and other non-English speaking countries.

My average unique visitors per day increased from 2000 to 3000, and is now approaching the 4000 visitors per day despite being a little lazy updating this blog this month. And the earnings? Last month was an all-time high for me on Google Adsense, but it seems that this month will break the record once again.

So, do I recommend installing the Global Translator Plugin on your blog? If you want additional traffic and income, go on. Give it a try!

Update (January 17, 2009): Some languages on Global Translator Plugin are not supported by Google Adsense. You should read this post to make it fully compliant with Google Adsense TOS.